In the choir, behind the high altar, Agnolo Gaddi, one of the two sons of Taddeo, has painted, with a charm and brightness of colour that hide the poor design, the story of the Holy Cross.  It was at the request of Jacopo degli Alberti that Agnolo painted these eight frescoes, where the angel gives a branch of the Tree of Life from Eden to Seth, whom Adam, feeling his death at hand, had sent on this errand.  Seth returns, however, only to find Adam dead, and the branch is planted on his grave.  Then in the course of ages that branch grows to a tree, is hewn down, and, as the Queen of Sheba passes on her way to King Solomon, the carpenters are striving to cut this wood for the Temple, but they reject it and throw it into the Pool of Bethesda.  And this rejected tree was at length hewn into the Cross of Our Lord.  Then comes Queen Helena to seek that blessed wood, and finding the three crosses, and in ignorance which was that of Our Lord, commands that the dead body of a youth which is borne by shall be touched with them all, one after another.  So they find the True Cross, for at its touch the dead rises from his bier.  Then they bear the cross before the Queen:  till presently it is lost to Chosroes, King of Persia, who took Jerusalem “in the year of Our Lord six hundred and fifteen,” and bare away with him that part of the Holy Cross which St. Helena had left there.  So he made a tower of gold and of silver, crusted with precious stones, and set the Cross of Our Lord before him, and commanded that he should be called God.  Then Heraclius, the Emperor, went out against him by the river of Danube, and they fought the one with the other upon the bridge, and agreed together that the victor should be prince of the whole Empire:  and God gave the victory to Heraclius, who bore the Cross into Jerusalem.  So Agnolo Gaddi has painted the story in the choir of S. Croce.

In the chapels on the north side of the choir there is but little of interest.  And then one is a little weary of frescoes.  If we return to the south aisle and pass through the door between the Annunciation of Donatello and the tomb of Leonardo Bruni, we shall come into the beautiful cloisters of Arnolfo, where there will be sunshine and the soft sky.  Here, too, is the beautiful Cappellone that Brunellesco built for the Pazzi family, whose arms decorate the porch.  Under a strange and beautiful dome, which, as Burckhardt reminds us, Giuliano da Sangallo imitated in Madonna delle Carceri at Prato, Brunellesco has built a chapel in the form almost of a Greek cross.  And without, before it, he has set, under a vaulted roof, a portico borne by columns, interrupted by a round arch.  It is the earliest example, perhaps, of the new Renaissance architecture.  Very fair and surprising it is with its frieze of angels’ heads by Donatello, helped perhaps by Desiderio da Settignano.  Within, too, you come upon Donatello’s work again, in the Four Evangelists in the spandrels, and below them the Twelve Apostles.